Westerners reimagined the Kaifeng synagogue to fit their expectations rather than its actual architecture.

Evidence

After several attempts, various Jesuits missionaries failed to provide any tangible result despite Gozani’s positive report. In the 1720s, a French Jesuit named Jean Domenge managed to send back to Europe some sketches that he had made of the Kaifeng synagogue. His drawings, however, were considered unattractive, and were reworked by Father Joseph Brucker, so that they would look more like the Chinese synagogue that fit the Western imagination. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 349

Categorization

• SEED: A ready-made essay angle: how ‘correction’ of primary visual/documentary evidence to fit expectations is a recurring colonial-intellectual failure, from synagogue sketches to modern photo retouching of artifacts.
• XREF: Echoes the pattern in ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ of Western observers reshaping the Other to fit their preconceptions rather than recording what they saw.